SPRINGFIELD, Ill., July 31, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following was released today by the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA):

As time soothes the sorrow in the aftermath of the Colorado murders, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn finds himself in the familiar role of being the life of the party who pulls a not-so-funny joke from his hat. Quinn's latest dud comes in the form of an amendatory veto that guts the language of a popular ammunition sales bill, replacing it with language that would ban a sizable portion of the privately owned firearms in the state. The gun ban language comes directly from a gun control bill that has failed on the floor of the Illinois House on numerous occasions.

"The governor's veto serves as a cynical wisecrack during the discussion of what to do about mass murderers," commented ISRA Executive Director Richard Pearson. "The governor has a well known flair for the histrionic, so a pointless and self serving gesture on his part did not come as a surprise. Anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention to the post-Aurora debate knows that mainstream thought on the issue is pointing towards identifying and controlling dangerous persons and not towards punishing law-abiding citizens. Governor Quinn apparently missed the message and has conveniently forgotten that Senate rules make passage of his veto highly unlikely."

The bill is bad public policy as it instantly criminalizes formerly legal behavior and thus potentially brands hundreds of thousands of good Illinois citizens as criminals. The bill also renders many millions of dollars of valuable, legally acquired firearms worthless.

The bill is ineffective as its provisions only apply to law-abiding citizens and contain no solutions to the problem of violent criminal activity.

The bill is largely unenforceable as there are literally millions of firearms potentially affected by the bill and the whereabouts of potentially affected firearms is not known. If the governor plans on house-to-house searches for affected firearms, then such would open the door to a whole new set of problems.

The bill would be extremely expensive to implement with no benefit to the public. Registration of firearms and accessories along with enforcement of penalty provisions would consume millions of State Police man hours at a time when budgets are tight and serious crimes plague both our urban and rural areas.

"The ISRA is confident that the governor's sideshow attempt to implement punitive gun control measures will flop," continued Pearson. "I'm sure that there's not too many members of the Senate who relish the idea of meeting with their constituents a couple of weeks before election day to explain why they turned voters into criminals and essentially took their guns away from them."

The ISRA is the state's leading advocate of safe, lawful and responsible firearms ownership. For more than a century, the ISRA has represented the interests of millions of law-abiding Illinois firearm owners.